One of the most celebrated, awe-inspiring images of modern astronomy, revealing colossal spires of interstellar gas and dust called the Pillars of Creation, has been rendered anew with greater depth, clarity and color by the James Webb Space Telescope.
The new view of the pillars, first made famous when captured in 1995 by Webb's predecessor observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, was unveiled by NASA on Wednesday, three months after Webb's inaugural batch of cosmic photos was unveiled as it began full operations.
The spellbinding images show vast, towering columns of dense clouds of gas and dust where young stars are forming in a region of the Eagle Nebula, in the Serpens constellation, some 6,500 light-years from Earth.